This week, the City of Detroit rolled out its blight plan. Of course, the national press highlighted the traditional “bad news about Detroit” story that we’ve heard for 40 years, replete with the traditional photo of the Ren Cen with a burned out house in the foreground.

The reports cite the negative big scary numbers: $850 Million to demolish most of the blight in the next five years; the City has access to about 1/2 of that; 84,641 blighted or nearly blighted structures and vacant lots, 1/2 of which should be demolished and cleaned up immediately; 93% of the properties held by governments need to be knocked down or cleaned up.

Well, that sure sounded bad but up at the Mackinac policy conference, Mayor Duggan told the most uplifting (in my opinion) Detroit blight story that I have ever heard. He talked about his goal to increase the City’s population by the end of his term – 3 years away.

Mayor Duggan talked about relighting the City’s streetlights, he talked about improved emergency response and about other issues. But the best part of his talk was about blight. He discussed his new neighborhood approach – focusing on one neighborhood at a time; not waiting 3 years to take the properties back for taxes and, most importantly, telling owners of blighted homes to either agree to fix the homes in 6 months or lose them. Amazingly (to everyone including Mayor Duggan), many of the owners have stepped up and begun making repairs. The City has an auction site, which has gotten some national notice and, literally, thousands of people have shown up for open houses and the City has sold homes, sometimes for more than suburban homes. The Mayor discussed one neighborhood with 49 homes slated for demolition – after using his new approach, that list was cut to nine.

Certainly there are areas of the City that will need to be swept clean (and hopefully primed for redevelopment), and there are areas that won’t be addressed for a while, but the Mayor’s neighborhood program was a very uplifting breath of fresh air.